2000

Accurate oculomotor control is one of the essential pre-requisites for successful visuomotor coordination. In this paper, we suggest a biologically inspired control system for learning gaze stabilization with a biomimetic robotic oculomotor system. In a stepwise fashion, we develop a control circuit for the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) and the opto-kinetic response (OKR), and add a nonlinear learning network to allow adaptivity. We discuss the parallels and differences of our system with biological oculomotor control and suggest solutions how to deal with nonlinearities and time delays in the control system. In simulation and actual robot studies, we demonstrate that our system can learn gaze stabilization in real time in only a few seconds with high final accuracy.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems